The present invention relates generally to monitoring information technology (IT) environments, and more particularly, to a method, computer system and computer program product for monitoring objects of an IT environment.
Nowadays, as information systems become ubiquitous, and companies and organizations of all sectors become severely dependent on their computing network and IT services, the demand for tools for monitoring IT environments increases rapidly. The class of sensitive IT services includes online transaction processing, electronic commerce, Internet/World Wide Web, data warehousing, telecommunication switches, and server applications that generally run 24 hours a day. In addition, almost all internal business processes such as electronic communication or information retrieval rely on a properly functioning IT network. These servers must run perpetually, providing a service to the employees and clients, and therefore demand a high availability as the cost of any outage can be substantial. While it is essential for companies to maintain the health of their IT services, the underlying IT environments become more and more complex and thus susceptible to failures. Not only is the number of computers within an IT network growing rapidly, i.e. the size of the network is increasing, but also the applications and services within the network are changed quite regularly as a result of frequent software upgrades, rapid technology improvements of the hardware components, new user requirements, and so on. For big companies or IT consulting companies that operate the IT infrastructure of several other companies, the number of relevant IT services may easily exceed 10,000. Such large IT networks with their dynamic environment make it impossible for administrators and operators to keep an overview over the performance of the IT services and to respond to problems without an appropriate service management tool.
Operators of complex services are often confronted with a large number of messages reporting the status and errors of the IT services. Due to the number of components of the IT environment and the complex interactions between those components, it is difficult for the operator to resolve the dependencies of the generated error messages and to track down the origin of the problem. Moreover, it is even difficult to detect the important error messages and to distinguish them from the less important messages, along with the risk of overlooking relevant messages.
In view of these problems, the present applicant offers a service management tool (HP OpenView VantagePoint for Windows(trademark)) aiming to support administrators and operators of complex network-based IT services. Although this system runs under Windows(trademark) it is able to manage heterogeneous networks independent of the platform. A service management tool is an IT solution for managing the availability and performance of IT-based business services from the end-user""s perspective. Those tools are able to detect and evaluate the performance of the servers or applications, recognise and warn the operator when a problem is about to occur and respond automatically to poor performance. They allow the user to manage individual services and all elements that depend on these services. In particular, they enable the user to build management models that represent the services and the relationships and dependencies between them. In general, the task of administrators is to set up the management model, to configure it, maintain the model configuration and to define failures and suppression criteria in order to reduce the information which is sent to the operator. The operator""s primary function is then to monitor the status of a service and to troubleshoot and respond to problems using the information provided by the service management tool.
Usually, large IT environments are operated by several administrators, each one being responsible for individual parts of the network or for special services. One function of the service model is to combine the information and know-how of the different administrators and to integrate them into a single model. However, IT networks are usually highly dynamic environments in which services and network components are changing very rapidly. Handling of such dynamic environments is complex and difficult.
According to one aspect, the invention relates to a method performed by a service management system for monitoring objects of an IT environment. At least some of the objects and their dependencies are represented in a service model. The method comprises that data relating to an object that is not represented in the service model is automatically processed by the service management system and, when said object is later included in the service model, the results of this processing are available for monitoring the included object.
According to an other aspect, the invention relates to a computer system comprising a service management system for monitoring objects of an IT environment. At least some of the objects and their dependencies are represented in a service model. The computer system comprises that data relating to an object that is not represented in the service model is automatically processed by the service management system and, when said object is later included in the service model, the results of this processing are available for monitoring the included object.
According to still another aspect, the invention is directed to a computer program product including program code for carrying out a method when executed on a computer system. The method is performed by a service management system for monitoring objects of an IT environment. At least some of the objects and their dependencies is represented in a service model. The method comprises that data relating to an object that is not represented in the service model is automatically processed by the service management system and, when said object is later included in the service model, the results of this processing are available for monitoring the included object.
Other features are inherent in the disclosed method and computer system or will become apparent to those skilled in the art from the following detailed description of embodiments and the accompanying drawings.